


Allegro

by antistar_e (kaikamahine)



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan
Genre: F/F, F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-26
Updated: 2010-06-26
Packaged: 2017-10-30 23:28:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/337350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kaikamahine/pseuds/antistar_e
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four couples, a summer, and what love is all about.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Allegro

**Author's Note:**

> Everybody has one fic that just _exhausts_ you on some fundamental level. Like, it feels like you just reached inside of you and used something overwhelmingly raw in order to put the words on the page, and it actually hurts when you're done.
> 
> This was that fic for me.
> 
> You can read this here or [@ LJ](http://veritasrecords.livejournal.com/94219.html).

-

 

**May.**

See, the thing is, love is _exactly_ what it's cracked up to be.

It's worth fighting for, worth giving up everything for, worth the Labyrinth, and even worth blowing up the _Princess Andromeda_ and stealing the armor of a daughter of Ares. It's worth the risk, because by not risking anything, you're really risking _never_ knowing, and that's even worse.

This epiphany strikes Chris in the middle of 3D Art Workshop, three days before the end of the semester and twelve hours before his final portfolio is due.

He is up to his elbows in red clay, thick and clumpy in the webbing of his fingers, and without thinking he drops his hands and lets his ceramic wobble away and goes, "What am I _doing?"_

His friend at the next workstation kind of looks at him sideways and goes, "Dude, are you drunk?" Which Chris ignores, as this is Antonio's assumption about everybody who acts out of the ordinary -- Tony's the kind of guy who's never had anything unexpected happen to him, outside of the occasional traffic accident and the days he forgot to pack a lunch: he's never really had trouble in school, his brain isn't hard-wired for ancient Greek, and he hasn't wandered in circles through the dirt-and-bones maze of the Labyrinth until the inside of his own head turned to barbed wire fences, untethered from his body and floated away. And most days, he's Chris's best friend, a stable point of gravity.

"Ummm," offers Antonio when Chris stands up, tosses his towel onto the wheel and heads over to the sink. "Dude, are you cracking up?"

_Been there, done that,_ Chris thinks. _This is the opposite of that._ "This is coming back together," he says out loud, sticks his hand under the faucet and washes the clay off of him. He looks over his shoulder; Antonio's sculpture is half-completed, a spiraling twirl of grocery store twist-ties looped around one another, making a panorama of birds in flight. "Tones, are you and the boys doing anything tonight?"

What you need to understand about Chris is that he isn't evil. Dumb? Yes. Lonely? Most definitely. Really, _really_ blind to what he had right in front of him? You bet. But he didn't join Kronos's army because he felt a deep and abiding need to watch his friends suffer. He just wanted to know who his mother was.

For the longest time, he thought that was all he wanted. Now, he thinks it's better that he still has no idea, because how can that end well for either of them? For years, _why did you never want me?_ has burned a hole in Chris's mind and heart and he's old enough, now, to know he doesn't want the answer. Not really.

Chris and his father live in a trailer park in south Dallas. They have an RV with a broken axle that perpetually leans to the right; the Rodriguezes always drink out of tumblers or canteens, anything with a lid, as glasses are always in danger of slipping sideways and spilling. Chris has a cot in the back and his dad falls asleep in front of the computer most nights; one of his earliest memories is of the man slumped over with his chin to his chest, the monitor flickering in the dim, Windows 95 up on the screen. He earns their paycheck by collecting strangely-shaped glass bottles and selling them to collectors on eBay; the plywood ledge above Chris's pillow is lined with bulbous Orangina bottles and long, skinny fruit drinks and listing bottles of rum. His dad had Chris get a job sacking groceries at Wal*Mart as soon as he was old enough. The strangest thing about coming home after the summer of 2009 was to go right back to it, listening to women in overlarge shirts yell at him about what he doesn't have in stock and looking at them and thinking, _the world almost ended, you dipshit, and all you do is complain about your mop refills._

That night, he slips through the partition between his "room" and the rest of the trailer and sneaks his father's car keys out of the little dish on the counter. Mr. Rodriguez snorts in a pissant manner, but doesn't wake. He thinks about leaving a note, but doesn't -- he can offer explanation later, when he figures it out. 

He treads quietly down the steps, slipping his hand around the doorjamb to keep the screen from slamming. Turning away is the easiest thing he's done.

Antonio and a couple of the guys from his dorm are mingling by his dad's beige Dodge Neon. In a series of heated whispers, they arrange themselves around the car and shove at it until it starts to roll, with Chris behind the wheel to steer it. When they're far enough away from the trailer that the sound of the key turning in the ignition won't make Mr. Rodriguez come flying out in a rage, Chris shifts his foot to the brake and sticks his head out the window. "Thanks, guys!" he goes, grinning at them so wide it hurt his face and never more glad, in that moment, for friends that will help sneak you out of the house in the middle of the night.

"Good luck getting wherever you're going, man," goes Antonio. He makes sure to stand in the rearview mirror until Chris reaches the main street and hangs a left, heads for the interstate. This is how Chris will remember him; a tiny figure in the shaking glass, one arm raised in a wave.

The thrill of getting away with it -- running away, ditching school and work and his father, blazing down the road with the radio fizzing in between stations and the windows down enough to let the roar of the road in -- lasts a good third of the drive, long enough to cross the state border into Louisiana and to hop the 1-49 heading south.

It's an eight-hour drive altogether, the nothingness of Texas fading into the green smells and the matchstick trees of the Louisiana bayou. Chris spends most of it thinking -- about what he's given up, about how he brought nothing with him besides his wallet and a bottle of flat Pepsi, how he's risking everything and isn't sure if he can go back, and not regretting a single part of it.

He reaches the outskirts of New Orleans after the worst of the morning traffic has gone through, giving himself a mental shake to get rid of the inertia of interstate travel, slowing down to the residential speeds.

He memorized Clarisse's address a long time ago, could tell you how to get there three-quarters drunk and babbling insane. Her mortal family comes from old French roots, Cajun to their core, but they moved to a house in classless suburbia sometime when Clarisse was fourteen. He remembers listening to her bitch about it that summer -- how they'd just gotten all moved in when Katrina hit and they had to do it all over again, but lucky for them they still weren't living in that "gods-awful artsy flat in the old French Quarter."

Her new house is the same dead grey-green color of a rotting corpse, identical to three other houses on her street, which are in the minority compared to all the cookie-cutter browns and tans of the other places. The house number's worn off the porch, but Chris immediately knows it's hers -- no one else on the block would be waving a flag with the sword-and-shield emblem of Ares on it.

He parks two houses down, and proceeds to have an out-of-body experience, like it's someone else walking him around to the back of the house, finding the window on the second story with black bed sheets as curtains, like he's watching someone else reach down and find a hard clump of dirt and throw it at the window of the love of his life, hearing it ping satisfyingly.

It takes all of twenty seconds for the window to slam up and for Clarisse to greet him with a crossbow to the face and several snarled expletives and a threat involving a tub of acid and his mother's gall bladder, all of which she manages to get out before she recognizes him.

"What the _fuck,_ Chris," she goes, which for her is practically a warm welcome. The crossbow lowers. "What are you doing here?"

"I came to see you." Chris's legs are trembling weak from the drive and from the moment. 

She pulls her head back a little bit. "Nobody's home," she calls down. "You could have just, you know, rung the doorbell."

"Yeah, but that makes sense. This was more fun."

She rolls her eyes so hard all he sees are the whites, and slams the window shut. He can hear the locks click pointedly shut and grins, walking around back the way he came. She lets him in through the front door, scowling unnecessarily hard, which is her way of not letting it show that really, she's trying not to smile. Her eyes, though, are a riotous mix of things, and do all the talking for her.

"I should have just turned the lawn sprinklers on you," she grumbles without bite. "I thought you still had school."

"I do." He steps in close, grabbing her wrist to check her watch. "And my next class starts in twenty-five minutes, but I don't care."

She smiles at him with her eyes again and tugs herself out of his grip, but not meanly. She's busy staring at him, not blinking, like she's expecting him to disappear. He kind of knows the feeling.

"I had to see you," he offers, and it's one of those things that always sounds when other people say it, but on him, it's just _really_ ridiculous-sounding, like he's reading a script. He says it anyway, because she's always made him want to try.

"And you couldn't wait until summer break."

He shakes his head, earning him another one of those gonna-fall-out eyerolls. "No point," he goes.

She's going to argue, he can tell, so he just pulls her in the last few inches and wraps her up tight in a hug, and closes his eyes against the way everything inside of him swoops like the downwards swing of a rollercoaster, that moment of weightlessness in which he knows, he _knows_ just like he knew the day before, up to his elbows in wet clay, that this is why he's around. What other purpose could he possibly have been given arms, if not to hug Clarisse la Rue? For what other reason could he be here, if not to be the boy that loves her?

This, he thinks. This is what's worth fighting for. This is worth the years of anger, the frustration, the Labyrinth, the horror of sleeping Manhattan. This, right here, an Ares girl looking at him and trying not to smile lest it look like she's in love.

In that moment, Chris feels an overwhelming surge of pity for everybody on the planet who hasn't had their life threatened at one point or another, who hasn't been stared at by madness and come back from it to tell a Titan to suck it, bitch, he wasn't winning him. He feels sorry for those people who struggle to pinpoint the reason why they want someone, why they love someone, those people who've never been _tested,_ because to _know._ Without a shadow of a doubt, to know.

It's the best feeling in the world.

"Hi," he tells Clarisse, which is the closest he can get to summing that all up.

"Well, I'm glad you came all this way to astound me with your conversational gambits," she remarks, dry as bone dust.

And don't tell anyone, but Clarisse has a stuffed animal sitting on her bed. (" _Really?"_ had been his remark upon seeing it, unable to help himself. He snatched it up before she could get to him. He recognized it, vaguely, the yellow plush faded to gray in spots and the eyes scratched up and obviously the most frequent visitor in this bed, as -- "Cera," said Clarisse, looking huffy. "From The Land Before Time, remember?" And then he did, and snorted, because yeah, that one didn't surprise him at all. Catching Clarisse's eye, he grinned, and put Cera to the side, saying, "she's going to have to wait," and Clarisse laughs, big and full-throated, as he pushes her down onto the bed.)

 

 

**June.**

Percy narrates his story often enough for the younger generations of heroes that he's not in any danger of forgetting any of it -- because it is, frankly, a rather action-packed adventure, but sometimes it feels flat and pale like a photograph, and when he shows it to people, his thumbs catch on the blank margins and he can't tell them what's happening beyond them.

First person is a cold and lonely road to take when it comes to story-telling, unable to expand beyond that narrow perception, and somewhere around the endless parade of _I_ s and _me_ s, he wishes for a third person omniscient to come in and tell him what everyone else is thinking, so that he knows for a fact and doesn't have to go through life fumbling and guessing like everybody else. He's gotten so many things wrong.

Mostly, though, he wants someone to tell him that he's doing okay, that this is the life he's destined for. It seems like a legitimate concern, as most of his life has already been dictated by destiny, and it takes a shamefully long time to learn how to make his own decisions.

Annabeth's hand is caught in his, fingers spread and the webbing between them warm under his thumb as he slides the ring onto her finger and says, "I cannot tell you what you mean to me. The words don't exist," and reads in the minute quirk of her smile that she thinks he's copping out of confessing his feelings in front of everybody they know, and reads in the look in her eyes that she doesn't mind, she's marrying him anyway.

It's a June wedding, elegant and clean in the way that summer weddings are; there's only a thin cloud cover turning the sky to a color like foam, enough sun leaking through to catch on the threads of Annabeth's gown, making them look like gossamer.

The minister feeds him lines and Percy takes them, repeats them, and will be unable to tell you what they were, later.

He slides a hand around the waistline of Annabeth's bodice, pulls her close to kiss her when prompted, and thinks he hadn't been lying: he'll never be able to tell this part properly -- all the words on the transparent thin pages of a dictionary, and not one of them come close to describing how absolutely _full_ he feels right in this moment, pressure splintering up into his sternum and nerve endings alive everywhere, from his forehead to the pads of his fingertips, making every movement of the world around him feel like something epic, something worth telling about.

The sun-flare bright feeling lessens only slightly at the reception, where Percy's kept busy talking to people and trying to keep his best man from eating the napkins.

"I don't do well with crowds," Grover explains to him in an anxious bleat, and after taking his last bite of cake, starts on the paper plate like it's the next logical course of action.

They'd all been leery of having a reception in the first place. It felt too much like asking for trouble; bad enough putting them and all their friends together for the ceremony itself -- bringing them together again just felt like offering up a buffet table, all-you-can-eat feast of heroes and clueless mortals for dessert.

Juniper'd found the place; a quiet park and playground hemmed in by a copse of trees and opening out onto a grassy hill, which currently is one long sweep of multi-colored whirl-i-gigs, twisting and spinning and blinking in the breeze. Annabeth slips off her shoes as soon as she arrives, because she's only worn heels, like, twice in her entire life, including today, and they're too ridiculous to wear a moment longer. 

The grass is cool between her toes, and at this point in time, it feels like the most amazing thing that's ever happened to her. She straddles the back of a folding chair, pulling all the pins out of her hair so that it tumbles down around her shoulders with the lingering acid aroma of hairspray, and wriggles her feet around a little bit.

She's still caught in that surreal feeling when she catches a glimpse of wispy silver in the corner of her eye, and turns her head just as Thalia takes the seat next to her, leaning it back onto two legs.

"I don't think he's good enough," she announces, apropos of nothing.

"You don't think any boy is good enough," Annabeth remarks.

"For you? Damn straight there isn't one," Thalia fixes her with a look, the whirl-i-gigs flashing and dancing behind her as bright as the sunlight off her tiara. Her black jeans have to be killing her in this weather, or maybe it doesn't bother you if you're immortal. "In my mind, you'll always going to be that little girl who stabbed a Cyclops in the big toe and told it bullying wasn't the answer."

Annabeth's mouth quirks. She remembers that; Thalia and Luke both looked like they were going to _pass out._ Good times.

"You never dated anyone else," Thalia points out. "Are you really sure?"

It's a little late to be asking that, Annabeth thinks, but the genuine question in Thalia's voice makes her pause.

She looks over, automatic, to where Percy's talking to her father, who has forgotten decorum and is sitting right on top of the refreshments table, casual slacks a handswidth away from a plate of crackers and cheese. Percy's telling him their plans, his hands moving rapid fast with his words, gesticulating so much she has no doubt exactly what he's talking about ("we're looking at a house, now, somewhere outside of the city. Somewhere with -- _oh,_ with a lawn. Wouldn't it be great to have a lawn, all big and ... lawn-like." He falters for a moment, because he's never had a lawn. He glances sideways at Dr. Chase. "Erm, what exactly do you _do_ with a lawn?")

This is what Annabeth knows.

Percy loves everybody. He has to: it was a matter of self-defense, really, because saving the world isn't really something you could do half-assed or feeling lukewarm about it, and he could train and prepare all he wanted, but if he didn't love who and what he was rescuing, there was no point. He learned young to love everything, and just never turned it off.

After a few tries, Annabeth figured out that being jealous about it wasn't going to get her anywhere -- Percy's always going to give some part of himself to everyone, some half-tilted smile or a tongue-in-cheek anecdote and a little bit of his soul, and she's smart, she's worked it out: Percy loves everyone, but he loves Annabeth differently. It's not a question of more or less, just that it's love.

And the gods help her, she looks at him and thinks of the sea, how lovers are always depicted by the sea, the young shoving each other in and out of the surf, the old walking along hand-in-hand, the way the endless tug of the tides makes people stop, want to hold on to others. At the risk of pulling this metaphor to silly proportions, Percy's as easy to love as the sea is. And she's always going to have to share him, which is good, because she doesn't think she can handle his pig-headedness by herself all the time.

In equal pulls, he makes her feel weak and mighty, vulnerable and invincible, but more often than that, it's just natural, the feeling that remains when all the rest of it is gone.

And one day, she stopped looking at him and imagining their life together and instead tried to imagine what life without him would be like, and when it's the latter she couldn't fathom, she knew.

Whatever Thalia may think, this isn't settling.

"This is what I want," she says, and buries her toes in the grass again.

 

 

**July.**

Nico likes dawn best from the night-long side of things, a forever stretch of darkness and the coming light, turning the earth back to rose and green like pulling off a blanket.

Months ago, he moved his bed so that it was right underneath the window, never mind the fact it kind of blocked the dresser and made it impossible to reach the power outlet, because he likes it, this moment, covers still warm around his thighs and his weight leaning forward on the windowsill. Below, traffic's starting up again on Melrose, delivery trucks going by in a high whine, cooks in aprons darting into alleyways, yawns popping from their mouths. The birds are starting their dawn chorus, trills like the highest flutes, and the air conditioner clicks on in the window above his, rattling away in a dutiful manner.

He reaches behind him to jostle the man asleep in the wreck of his covers. "Percy," he goes, no real reason to whisper but doing it anyway. "Percy, wake up, there's a shooting star. You can still see it."

Percy lifts his head from the cocoon of a loose pillow and his forearm, and then pushes himself up so he could lean in to see the lightening sky, eyes screwed up against the brightness, even this early into sunrise.

"Make a wish," continues Nico, remembering in the sudden up-flush way he does these days that he used to do the same thing with his sister when they were children. There were more stars falling then, visible from the hotel roof in the capital city. Bianca was very serious about wishing on every one, for extra insurance. _Just in case,_ he hears her child's voice whisper in his memory, mouthing over the words.

"Dude," Percy offers in a drowsy rasp. "I'm pretty sure that's a jet. You can go ahead and wish on it if you want, though."

He flops back down onto his back, stretching in the sheets to the faint crackle-pop of his back and knees. There are lines from the fabric creased red into his skin. He catches Nico looking, and his smile turns into a grin, lazy, stretching his mouth enough that his eyes scrunch up into crescent moon shapes.

"C'mere," he goes, and Nico doesn't need any more encouragement, falling back and uncurling to the twig and branches groan of his arms and legs, which had locked up like that, stretching them out against Percy. Their feet tangle, jostle, wrap themselves in the cool-smooth covers and draw them up around their ankles, settling together. 

He leans up to reach Percy's mouth, kisses him and kisses him without hurry or intent to breathe, mouths sour with morning and sleepy-warm. He knows the next time he comes up, outside the window Los Angeles will be brighter for it.

Don't tell anyone, but Nico likes the way Percy kisses him, a breath of hesitance before he tilts his chin into it, like he's uncertain of his welcome, like he's waiting to be refused. It's exasperating, because how can _anyone_ refuse Percy (well, okay, they do it all the time, but about the things that _really_ matter?) Nico spent his formative years hunting for a replacement role model and wound up with Percy, and still can't wrap his head around the idea of _not_ wanting him.

Percy's fingers slip up to cradle the back of his head, tilting him into a deeper kiss, and the heavy band on his ring finger taps hard against his skull.

He pulls away, catching Percy's hand and pulling it out in front of him to inspect it. The wedding ring is an alloy metal, Nico knows, knows in his bones the way he knows all things that come out of the earth, part platinum and part celestial bronze. It's smooth to the touch, warmed to body temperature.

"Does your wife know?" comes out of his mouth before he can really stop it.

Percy tugs his hand out of his grasp, self-consciously twisting the ring around in its groove at the base of his finger but not removing it. "I've never made a secret out of it, if that's what you're asking," he says finally, speaking to the water stains on Nico's ceiling. Persephone, on her single visit to fetch him for Thanksgiving dinner, had commented that he could do so much better than this bohemian ghetto of an apartment, but her disapproval was only enough to make him more fond of it. 

"Annabeth would have to be an idiot not to suspect," Percy continues, this time with a gravity to his voice that Nico pays attention to. "She's not an idiot. And the fact I told her where I was going and she let me go ... I dunno, I might be reading into it, but doesn't that say..." he trails off, like he's not sure where it was going. "Annabeth's the smartest person I know, and she married me despite everything," he says firmly. "She knows she's not threatened. Not by you or anyone."

"You should tell her that," goes Nico, who knows firsthand that verbal assurances are the best (he had, in fact, gone to extreme lengths to get one from his sister, once upon a time) and doesn't particularly want to watch Percy get pooped on by every single owl that passes him by for the rest of his life.

Percy crinkles his nose up, knee-jerk reaction to confronting a girl about any touchy subject.

And it's still new to Nico, the whole idea of not thinking about himself all the time, so it's taken him awhile to come around to the idea that maybe it's not right, letting Percy use Mrs. O'Leary to shadow-teleport himself across the country to spread him out on his bed and suck bruises into his skin when he's got a girlfriend waiting for him at home.

The most important person in Percy's life is his mother. Second is Annabeth Chase, the now Mrs. Jackson. Nico himself appears somewhere around or after Grover and Tyson, being a mix of best friend and little brother. He knows this.

Outside, down on the street, a woman comes out the door of her complex, teetering on high heels. She is impeccable; smooth pencil skirt and silky top, her hair artistically coifed, and she's digging in her purse for the keys to the black SUV sitting on the curb. Just as she finds them, the car lighting up with a faint beep and the blinking of its headlights, a man comes out after her, barefoot in a sleep shirt. She circles around to the driver's side, calling out a good-bye to him, but he gives chase, catching her up and giving her a long kiss that leaves her grinning, less poised than before but more beautiful. She's still smiling when she pulls herself up into the car.

Percy's fingers catch on the notches at the base of his spine. "Nico," he goes, almost a question.

Nico opens his mouth to say half a dozen things, the least of which are _you should go home_ and _there's a reason monogamy is so popular, you know,_ but none of it really gets past this noise that gets caught in the base of his throat.

"Dude, hey," and Percy's right there, hooking his chin around Nico's shoulder and pressing in close. "Does this make you happy?" he asks, and fits his teeth over his own mouthprint on Nico's neck.

Nico turns into the touch, catching his profile against Percy's and nosing at him. He thinks of the kid who'd chased him out of the Underworld and then followed him down willingly, who crawled out of the River Styx with his skin peeling off, for whom Nico turned traitor to his family. This is the boy who made the Great Prophecy his in spite of all the red herrings Fate put in his path, who saved the world, who made it worth saving, who makes fun of 90s songs when they come on the radio but knows all the words to them anyway. To Nico, Percy is the singular most important (living) person on the planet, and he's here, tucked up in Nico's bed with sounds of early morning Los Angeles drifting up to them, and this simple fact is enough to make Nico breathless, swamped under.

"Yes," is all he can manage, because somewhere along the line, what he felt towards Percy Jackson stopped being this desperate, lonely love, helpless in the face of how much he needed him, and started being a need bone-deep, earth-deep, born from how much he loved him.

Percy nods. "That's all I needed to hear," he whispers, and pushes Nico back into the sheets, boosting himself over him and pinning him to the mattress. His kiss, when he chases it back into Nico's mouth, is sure, absolutely sure, and Nico grabs his face between his hands and holds on, holds on.

Daylight breaks through the window, catching on every frazzled loose hair haloing Percy's head and in the color of his eyes and his smile, and Nico kisses him again and forgets he even thought about darkness.

 

 

**August.**

 

"Holy shit," goes the girl waiting on the exam room table. "What happened to your face?"

Self-consciously, Rachel pulls her hand out of her lab coat pocket and rubs the back of it against her cheeks. They feel hot and flushed, whorls of her hair sticking to the damp skin. She's given up trying to hide it when she cries, has since high school. It's a lost cause, with skin like hers.

"That's rich," she answers. "Coming from the girl who came into the emergency room with a broken hand."

"Oh ho. Is that the medical term for it?" She arches a mocking eyebrow. "No clean breaks in my metacarpals?"

"We try to use a certain kind of language in this clinic for the kind of people who punch things hard enough to break their hands."

This time, both eyebrows went up.

Rachel knows her. Doubts that Clarisse knows her back. Their lives only crossed with the paths of the people they had in common, but Rachel's seen her in dreams. She's different in person -- she smells, now, of antiseptic and the grape juice they give out to swallow pills with, but underneath it there's the lingering scent of her deodorant (men's, smells kind of like Axe) and, unmistakably, beer. She's broader in the shoulder than Rachel expected, more balanced-looking, like she's steady and ready to meet whatever's coming. She has the most gorgeous hair; wiry, black, curling around her cheeks and ears in twists like coils of brambles and ivy.

She steps further into the room, slipping the X-rays out of her folder and shoving them up onto the viewing machine and flicking on the light. The fractures in Clarisse's hand come up clear white in the ash-gray shape of her hand. "You have three clean breaks in your metacarpals," she says, tone dry.

"Yes, thank you, I could have told you that. Now are you going to splint me up, doctor?"

Rachel turns to the cabinets and rummages through them. "Who'd you punch?"

"Why were you crying?" Clarisse responded without missing a beat, hard-faced.

Rachel fingered the plastic coating of the splint for a moment, then peeled it back.

"I'm a girl," she said, more to the table underneath Clarisse than to her. "I cry at everything -- commercials on TV, Extreme Home Makeover, whenever I see a mother weep in relief when her son or daughter comes back alive from a car accident. Do I need an excuse?" She grabs a clean piece of gauze. "Who'd you punch?"

She steps into Clarisse's space. The smell is stronger up close, more human than any of her prophetic visions. Clarisse's mouth is swollen, dry ridges of skin frothing up white along the bow of her lower lip.

"Someone made an off-color joke," Clarisse says in a manner just edging a bit beyond control. "In a bar. About my fiance. It was too soon. You should see him. He's much worse off than this." She makes a gesture with the hand she's self-splinted up with a couple of coffee stirrers. Rachel catches it before she can injure herself further, pins it between her fingers and spreads it out. Clarisse's pulse is a beat in the fleshy part of her thumb, and Rachel wants to close her eyes against the tide of it.

"Too soon?" she echoes.

Clarisse swallows. "He died."

Rachel's eyes flicker up, then back down. She strokes the lines on the inside of Clarisse's palm before she starts unwrapping the makeshift splints. "I'm sorry. You're not wearing a ring."

"He's dead," is the harsh reply. "I don't need a stinking ring on my finger to remind me of that all the time. I think about it every other minute as it is, okay?"

"I know." Rachel tosses the coffee stirrers into the trash, starts aligning the proper splints to Clarisse's swollen, purple-tinged fingers.

When she looks up again, Clarisse is staring at some point over her shoulder. "We'd just started school together. We were going to be truckers, you know. The two of us. You can make good money trucking, and don't ever really have to deal with anybody, which is great, because I'm not a people person. I figured all I needed in the world was him. He was the only person I could stand to be around."

"How'd he die?"

A snort. "He slipped and cracked his head on the edge of our bathtub. He drowned." Her other hand clenches hard around the edge of the table, knuckles popping out white. Her voice comes out strangled. "It's so fucking _stupid._ He was a _hero._ He was my hero and he died the stupidest death and -- and --"

"And you go around punching people in retaliation. It's okay." She strokes Clarisse's wrist soothingly.

"The assault and battery charge I have waiting for me when I get out of here begs otherwise."

"I wanted to be an artist," Rachel offers, shifting her weight closer. "I always thought that no matter who I was supposed to become, at least I'd have my talent." She shrugs, a soft movement of her shoulders underneath her lab coat. "My dad wanted me to go into medicine, become a doctor -- any kind, he said, although he was leaning towards brain surgeon because he could brag about that one the hardest. And since my life has pretty much been mapped out before me, and my career has nothing to do with it, it seemed the least I could do to indulge him. So here I am, a resident in the ER, treating heroes like you injured in every day tragedies."

"And you still sound like a fucking artist."

"Thank you," Rachel smiles at her with all sincerity, watches the slow gradient slide of Clarisse's eyes as they _focus_ on her, really look at her, watches the faint movement of her mouth as she registers how close Rachel is, the shifting of her body -- towards, not away.

She finishes taping her fingers together and starts to reel off the usual spiel about icing it and keeping it elevated and not to put pressure on it, when Clarisse says, "Rachel," and makes her jump before she realizes that it's stitched into her breast pocket.

"Do you," Clarisse starts, her tongue running over her dry mouth, an almost nervous movement. "Do you think it's possible to look at someone and know that you love them, just like that? To know, maybe, from the first time you see them, that they could be somebody you could love?"

Rachel ducks her head, feels Clarisse's body lean towards her immediately, an instinctive, _no, look at me,_ as loud as if she'd spoken it.

She lifts her eyes again, laughing in the face of it, not unkindly. "I spend too much of my life telling other people how to fix their lives, or how it's all going to end. I don't know a thing about mine. What I believe, how I want to live it."

Clarisse touches her cheek, pulls the loose strands of her hair off her sticky cheek, away from her suddenly dry mouth.

"I want to," Rachel says softly. "I have to. If there's one thing I want to believe in, it's love."

It's easiest to love a stranger. A stranger you can walk away from at any point, and every second spent longer together than necessary is a choice.

"So what were you really crying about?"

"You. You're beautiful," whispers Rachel, and leans in.

 

 

-  
fin


End file.
